Sources have confirmed to us that Silicon Knights has apparently decided to scale back operations, and as part of this decision the company has let some of its employees go. The decision was made to allow the company to move to a core group focusing all of its efforts on future opportunities.

The interesting part of this is that the company claims that the rumors regarding the developers’ reliance on Nintendo are false. Nintendo is said to have dropped the developer following an unsuccessful bid to prevail in its lawsuit against Epic.

Despite all of the bad news, it is possible that an Eternal Darkness sequel might actually be in the pipeline as no one bothered to deny that this was the case. No numbers have been confirmed as to how many employees were let go, but we hear that it was not a large number.

With Apple already facing charges that it stole the name iPad from a Chinese business, it now seems to have angered writers by stealing their books.

A group of 22 Chinese authors have filed a claim against U.S. technology group Apple, claiming that its App Store flogs unlicensed copies of their books. According to the Chinese official media, the Writers Rights Alliance petitioned Apple last year to stop electronic distribution of the writers' books and had earlier persuaded Baidu, China's largest search engine, to stop publishing their material on its Baidu Library product.

Nothing happened so the writers want Apple to write a cheque for $8 million saying it was selling pirated versions of 95 books via its online store. Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said that as an IP holder Apple understood the importance of protecting intellectual property, and when we receive complaints we respond promptly and appropriately.

Social notworking site Facebook has denied claims that the world+dog is abandoning the site and found something better to do with their lives.

Yesterday it was revealed by Inside Facebook's own metrics tool that numbers of members in developing nations like the United States, as well as more civilised countries such as the UK were dropping. If it was not for the fact that countries which are starting to get computers were signing up, then numbers would be shrinking even more.

Facebook said that from time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of the reports use data extracted from their advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook.

It said that it was very pleased with its growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than half of their active users log on to Facebook in any given day.